Scientists from the University of Leuven have developed a new blood sample testing technique that can help police officers predict the age of an individual by analizing the aging process that takes place within DNA, according to GlobalPost. Typically, when DNA profiles don't match any within available databases or potential suspects, investigations stall. This new technique could help police by giving them additional information to work with in narrowing potential suspects.
"We looked at the literature and we found that specific chemical structure on the DNA are actually associated with age, so some chemicals at specific positions in our DNA actually increase or decrease with age, and we use the most significant positions to put them into a single test and use that on forensic samples," said Bram Bekaert, lead researcher of the project.
As we age, our tissues and organs change, a process governed by our DNA, explains the university's press release. After analyzing four DNA methylation markers that were associated with aging and testing them against hundreds of blood samples from crime victims whose age was already known, the team was able to test their new technique.
"We extracted the most significant ones (markers), most significant positions from those, put them together, we analyzed them in a large population of blood samples and small population of teeth and then correlated the chronological age, so the actual age of the individual with our predicted age and we saw that we could actually get a very nice correlation, a highly significant correlation with age," said Bekaert.
The results were promising – the team was able to pinpoint the age of individuals based on their blood samples with just a 3.75-year margin of error. Furthermore, the results improved with younger suspects.
"The blood test, for example, has an accuracy of about 3.75 years over a whole age population, meaning that from newborns up to about 91 years of age our accuracy was about 3.75," Bekaert said. "The younger the individual is the higher the accuracy is because it has had less influence of the environment. So the more a person has an influence over the environment on his epigenome, as we call it, so the chemical structures on the genome the larger the error rate will become. So the error rate for younger people is about two years of age, while for 91 years of age it will be about five and a half, six, years of age."
The findings were published in the Aug. 17 issue of Epigenetics.
